Schreck The Third or Yes, We Have. . .

My thoughts on Nosferatu

Between the original 1897 novel by Bram Stoker that introduced him to the world and the numerous films and plays adapted, either directly or freely, from that book, Dracula is perhaps the most iconic character in the history of the horror genre. The only drawback to this familiarity is that while the vampire genre as a whole is still capable of conjuring up scares, Dracula himself rarely longer offers up the kind of frights that he was once able to generate—perhaps the inevitable result of what can happen once you have been portrayed in films by the likes of, in descending order of horror, Judd Hirsch, Leslie Nielsen and Gerard Butler and inspired your own breakfast cereal. There are many reasons to admire Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s remake of F.W. Murnau’s loose and legally dubious 1922 adaptation that was the first Dracula-related feature to hit screens, but perhaps its most significant achievement is that it takes material so familiar that even those who have somehow never seen or read a single iteration of the story know the basic story beats due to cultural osmosis and makes it genuinely creepy again. Thanks to its combination of strong performances, grisly imagery and an atmosphere with a palpable sense of dread that suffuses the atmosphere throughout, this is a work that will send chills down the spines of even the hardiest of genre buffs as well as newcomers.

As the film opens, ambitious and recently married real-estate agent Thomas Hunter (Nicholas Hoult) is given an important, if odd, assignment from his boss, Knock—travel from his city of Wisborg to the wilds of Carpathia to meet with the reclusive Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgard) to sign some papers regarding his recent purchase of some local properties. After leaving his wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), in the care of her well-to-do brother Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife, Anna (Emma Corrin), he sets off on a journey that offers up plenty of bizarre sights even before he reaches Orlock’s crumbling manor. There, Thomas does his best to ignore the weirdness surrounding him but there are things that he doesn’t know about the imperious host who is about to make him his prisoner.

First, and most obvious, is the fact that Orlock is a vampire, a point that comes to a head during the inevitable moment when Thomas accidentally cuts himself in his presence. In addition, Orlock has actually made Knock into his servant and when he isn’t bossing people around at the office, he is making diabolical plans for his master’s relocation to Wisborg and doing desperately icky things to any poor pigeon that finds itself in his grasp. Most importantly, as we learn in the film’s creepily disorienting opening sequence, Ellen herself has a long-standing connection with Orlock as well that leaves her practically vibrating with fear that others dismiss as her just being over-emotional—you know how those women are. As a result, she, with the exception of oddball alchemist Professor Albert Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) is the only one who recognizes the nature of the evil that is on the way to infect the town—perhaps as a prelude to all of Europe—and that she is the only one who can possibly bring an end to it for good.

Over the course of his three previous features, the slow-burn witchcraft thriller The Witch, the deeply bizarre The Lighthouse and the brutal historical epic The Northman, Eggers has demonstrated himself at being a filmmaker who is good at finding new ways of exploring familiar genres through creating a dense, forbidding and convincing atmosphere for his stories and populating them with interesting characters, especially the female ones (as was the case with his best film to date, The Witch) but not so hot when it comes to telling those stories in a concise manner (such as in The Lighthouse, a film that continues to baffle me every time I see it). Those qualities are both in full force in Nosferatu as well. On the negative side, it must be said that this version clocks in 133 minutes, a significant upgrade from either the original film or Werner Herzog’s startling 1979 remake, and the added run time—which seems to consist largely of mostly unnecessary interactions with Friedrich and Anna (scenes which are not helped by Taylor-Johnson’s tepid presence and Corrin being largely wasted on a mostly nothing role) and increasingly repetitive arguments between Professor von Franz and his more sober-minded colleague, Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson)—doesn’t really add much of anything to the proceedings. Eggers employs a measured pace throughout and while the results are generally good in this regard—this is not the kind of story that would be more effective if told in a rapid-fire manner—there are moments when I found myself wishing that he would just get on with it already, especially since there are presumably very few potential audience members who aren’t fairly clear as to where the story is heading.

At the same time, I have to admit that, for the most part, these concerns did not occur to me until I gave the film a second viewing because I found myself caught up in the proceedings and how Eggers was bringing the creepiness back to such a familiar saga. Although there are a couple of shock moments here (such as our first look at the title character himself), he largely eschews that approach in order to establish and sustain a mood a quiet and elegant dread for virtually the entire running time. Eggers and regular cinematographer Although this is a film that all but cries out to be shot in black-and-white, Eggers and regular cinematographer Jarin Blaschke have created a look for their film that comes about as close as one can to being b&w while still shooting in color, an array of blacks, grays and steel-blue that serve to underscore the chilliness of the proceedings while allowing the inevitable blood-red images to practically pop off the screen. The production design from Craig Lathrop is equally impressive—as in his previous collaborations with Eggers, he and his team have created a physical world for the actors that is so convincing that watching it is practically an immersive experience.

Eggers also gets a number of good performances from his cast as well. In the title role, Skarsgard may seem a tad odd at first as his look—including a drooping mustache and a man-fur—may disconcert viewers used to the more overtly rat-like features famously sported by Max Schreck in the original and Klaus Kinski in the Herzog version but his looming, loathsome presence , accentuated by a booming (and, I assume, sonically enhanced) voice, is so convincing in the sense of menace that it instills every time that he appears on the screen that it makes the other horror icon that he portrayed, Pennywise in the IT movies, seem penny-ante by comparison. As the hapless Thomas, Hoult is just fine in what is easily the most staid of the key roles but coming immediately on the heels of his work in Juror #2 and The Order, it serves as another reminder of just how versatile of an actor he is. On the other end of the spectrum, Dafoe (who, you will recall, once played a variation on the role of Count Orlock in the bizarre Shadow of the Vampire) is cheerfully chewing the scenery as the story’s equivalent to Professor van Helsing (a role previously essayed by such unapologetic hams as Laurence Olivier and Anthony Hopkins), tearing into some of the screenplay’s purplest lines with the glee of a child opening their Christmas packages and McBurney is on the same wavelength with his gonzo turn as Knock.

However, the biggest and most pleasant surprise among the cast is the performance by Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen. Over the last few years, she has appeared in a number of projects both here and in Europe (the most notoriously being the bomb HBO series The Idol) and where she has demonstrated a certain undeniable presence to go along with her obvious beauty. With this film, however, she shows that she has genuine acting chops as well. As conceived here, the role of Ellen is both a physical and emotional challenge, requiring someone to cover everything from rage to anguish to arousal, often in most operatic of ways, while at the same time serving as the living center of an oftentimes coldly cruel narrative. She pretty much manages to pull all of this of beautifully, especially during the mesmerizing final sequence in which she finds herself reconciling her genuine love for her husband and the combination of revulsion and arousal that she nevertheless feels towards Orlock, the creature she has been linked with for as long as she can recall, in an act of self-sacrifice that might have come across as ridiculous if misplayed but which, thanks to her, comes across as tragic, triumphant and arousing in equal measure.

If forced to rank the three Nosferatu films that have been made to date, I would have to list this version at #3, though this says less about its inherent qualities than it does about its predecessors—the original is a cinematic landmark that still retain quite a bit of its power more than 100 years since it debuted and the Herzog version is perhaps even more impressive, thanks to the superlative performances from Kinski and Isabelle Adjani. That said, this is not just an ordinary act of cinematic homage, the kind of remake that ends up receding from the collective memory because it has nothing new or interesting to offer viewers to set it apart from its predecessors. Instead, Eggers has made a sturdy and uncommonly effective variation on a very standard them and the result is his strongest film since The Witch and one of the year’s most effective horror films.